KIEV, Ukraine — Pro-Russian insurgents killed at least 10 Ukrainian paratroopers in an ambush overnight near the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site in eastern Ukraine, military officials said on Friday.

Vladyslav Seleznyov, spokesman for Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation,” which began in mid-April to push out the insurgents who have seized control of large swaths of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, said a unit of paratroopers from the 25th Airborne Brigade were taken by surprise on Thursday while moving to a new position.

“The overwhelming enemy forces ambushed our troops in Shakhtarsk, taking advantage of the topography,” he told local ICTV channel on Friday, adding that the troops inflicted “significant losses” in an attempt to fight off their attackers.

In addition to the 10 paratroopers killed, 13 more were wounded and 11 went missing and were feared captured by the insurgents, acting Commander of the Ukrainian Landing Troops Yuriy Halushkin told reporters in Kiev on Friday morning.

Halushkin said the unit's commander did all he could to lead his troops to safety, but the insurgents got the best of them. The surviving troops have since been moved to a safe location and are being debriefed, he added.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Channel 112 reported that as many as 20 of the paratroopers had been killed.

Gruesome video that was reportedly taken by a rebel fighter and published to YouTube on July 31 shows several charred and mangled bodies said to be the Ukrainian paratroopers scattered around a burning armored vehicle. Some rebel fighters can be seen posing for photographs near the bodies of the dead soldiers.

Another video purportedly filmed by insurgents after the ambush and titled “POW Kovalenko” shows the insurgents interrogating a young Ukrainian officer by the name of Vadim Kovalenko.

In the video, embedded below, they scold him and his comrades for coming to eastern Ukraine to wage war and tell him they are “more Ukrainian” than him because they did not come to his home and open fire on people.

Later in the video, they force him to dig graves for his fallen comrades. At one point an insurgent asks him about the whereabouts of the commander who gave his unit the order to fight in Shakhtarsk. Kovalenko, gesturing to a freshly dug graves, says, “he’s there.”

Despite the fresh violence, a convoy of international investigators and observers made their way from their base in rebel-held Donetsk in the early morning on Friday to the Malaysia plane crash site to again inspect the wreckage. They did not pass through Shakhtarsk, the scene of the ambush, but drove nearly four hours on rural roads to get around to the site.

With more than 60 people, including additional personnel with equipment, the team traveling on Friday in 16 vehicles was the largest number of experts yet to visit the site, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in a tweet.

Rebel leader: Foreign police at crash site is 'essentially, military intervention'

Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday ratified an agreement with Australia and the Netherlands to allow 950 armed personnel to guard the crash site. Security is vital given that the site has been without proper security for more than two weeks. The OSCE has said that wreckage at the scene of the crash appears to have been tampered with, including being sawed into pieces, and some even removed.

Andriy Purgin, the self-proclaimed first deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People's Republic, said on Friday that bringing a foreign police contingent to his territory is "essentially, military intervention," Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

"According to our information, Kiev is preparing to give its consent to the presence on the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic of some 700 Dutch and 1,500 Australian police officers. Of course, it's an outrageous situation and it doesn't help resolve the situation," Purgin said.

The insurgents have been accused of hampering the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission and the tasks of international experts since the plane was shot down by a rocket likely from a Soviet-era Buk surface-to-air missile system on July 17, killing all 298 people on board.

In past months the rebels have met several members of the OSCE with hostility. Since the onslaught of the conflict in mid-April, three groups of monitors have been taken hostage and held in captivity for weeks.

Yet, in a video address to the OSCE on July 30, self-proclaimed people’s governor of the Donetsk People’s Republic appealed to the organization for help.

Speaking in shaky English, Pavel Gubarev, one of the few insurgent leaders who is also a Ukrainian citizen, said: “We hereby respectfully request from you and international monitoring force to oversee the role of the Ukrainian military from the People’s Republic of Donetsk, the creation of an internationally enforced buffer zone to protect us from future assaults and you help in setting up an international committee to secure the rights of ethnic Russian people of Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic.”

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.